Enduring Rites of the Mound Builders

Top 10 Discoveries of 2020 January/February 2021

Georgia, United States
(University of Georgia)
SHARE:

The site of a three-story-high earthen structure known as Dyar Mound now lies beneath central Georgia’s Lake Oconee, a reservoir created by a dam built in the 1970s. Before the dam’s construction, archaeologists excavated the mound, which was originally built in the fourteenth century A.D. by the ancestors of today’s Muscogee Creek people. Based on artifacts recovered from the site, they determined that Dyar Mound had been abandoned shortly after a 1539–1543 expedition led by Spanish explorer Hernando de Soto traversed the southeastern United States. De Soto and his retinue brought diseases that caused a population collapse in the region. This collapse has long been thought to have precipitated the sudden end of the Mississippian tradition, a widespread belief system practiced by the ancestral Muscogee peoples, among others.

A team led by Washington University in St. Louis archaeologist Jacob Holland-Lulewicz has now redated charcoal unearthed at Dyar Mound and used statistical modeling to determine that the site was not in fact abandoned after the de Soto expedition, but that people carried out Mississippian rites atop the mound for nearly 150 years more. “The ancestors of the Muscogee were resilient, and their practices endured for generations,” says Holland-Lulewicz, who notes that advances in radiocarbon dating methods will likely continue to help revise scholarly narratives of early contact between Europeans and Indigenous peoples.

MORE FROM Top 10 Discoveries of 2020

  • Top 10 Discoveries of 2020 January/February 2021

    Oldest Chinese Artwork

    Henan, China

    Read Article
    (© Luc Doyon and Francesco d’Errico)
  • Top 10 Discoveries of 2020 January/February 2021

    Oldest Maya Temple

    Tabasco, Mexico

    Read Article
    (Takeshi Inomata)
  • Features January/February 2021

    Top 10 Discoveries of the Decade

    The best finds of the past 10 years

    Read Article
  • Features January/February 2021

    Return to the River

    Members of Virginia’s Rappahannock tribe are at work with archaeologists to document the landscape they call home

    Read Article
    (Courtesy Julia King)
  • Letter from Woodhenge January/February 2021

    Stonehenge's Continental Cousin

    A 4,000-year-old ringed sanctuary reveals a German village’s surprising connections with Britain

    Read Article
    (Photo Matthias Zirn)
  • Artifacts January/February 2021

    Inca Box with Votive Offerings

    Read Article
    (Courtesy Teddy Seguin/Université Libre de Bruxelles)